While EA has nothing to announce just yet when it comes to a new Battlefield game, it looks like what the company has in mind for it goes beyond your standard sequel.

In the latest quarterly financials earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson was asked to give an update about the development of the Battlefield IP. Interestingly enough, Wilson’s answer points at a bigger focus on live services and how the franchise is being built as a platform to deliver it.

Douglas Creutz (TD Cowne): Just wondered if you could give an update on how the various projects that are associated with the Battlefield IP are progressing and maybe how that plays into some of the things you said earlier about giving your big franchises time to gestate so that they’re great when they come out

Andrew Wilson (EA CEO): Yes. I mean we don’t have any date announcements or future announcements, if that’s the question, certainly this time. What I’d say is I think we’ve put together an extraordinary creative leadership team. I know we’ve got the team gathering actually this week in Sweden. I had to call this morning with some of the leadership, and they’re very bullish on how that’s progressing. I think we’ve got extraordinary confidence in that team and extraordinary confidence in the progress they’re making against the future of that franchise.

And I come back to we’re not just building a game. We’re building a platform, content as a platform, to drive live services over the decades to come. And so as we continue to move through this process and becomes appropriate, we’ll share more about the future of Battlefield. But it is firmly implanted in that first pillar of our strategy: building games and experiences that attract and entertain massive online communities across platforms, across business models, across geographies. And we think that Battlefield is going to be a meaningful part of our future. And we’ll share more time and share more as time progresses.

While I’m not opposed to another Battlefield game being centered around live services — even if the last few that tried that didn’t exactly pan out well — let’s just hope that EA focuses on it to be a good Battlefield game first, and as a live services platform second. If not, we might have another Battlefield 2042 in our hands. Sure, DICE has made great strides in bringing that game’s focus back to where it needs to be, but one can argue that it should have been that way ever since it launched.

Speaking of Battlefield 2042, DICE is knee-deep in developing Season 5. While there’s no release date for that set just yet, the studio is lifting the lid on some of the changes it will bring to gamers. One of these said changes include squad management, which you can read about here.

As for the next Battlefield game, we don’t know a lot about it just yet. It’s been confirmed that it will feature a full-fledged single-player campaign, and that’s being built by new EA first-party studio Ridgeline Games in collaboration with an internal team at DICE.

Source: Seeking Alpha (login required)